J. S. Mill and the Despotism of Progress
On the futility of right-liberals who look to Mill for refuge from the progressivism that Mill helped create
I’m thrilled to be published for the first time in the indispensable journal UnHerd. Its editors invited me to comment on the legacy of J. S. Mill on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his death on May 7. I distill some of my rather intense distaste toward right-liberal invocations of J. S. Mill, namely how his defense of free speech and expression in On Liberty is supposed to save us from “wokeism.” This stance woefully misunderstands Mill’s project, which was to orient society in precisely the transgressive direction that dominates today.
I argue instead that Mill was not a defender of free speech for the sake of debate, but hoped unfettered challenges to custom would be the mechanism undermining traditional society, in favor of one dominated by progress. As I suggest in the piece, Mill’s work was shrewdly mistitled On Liberty; its actual theme is On Progress. I suggest that Mill would be quite gratified with the rise of a “despotism of progress,” particularly the way it constrained the backward traditionalism of ordinary people, toward whom he expressed unadulterated contempt.
I conclude:
Rather than look to Mill, those seeking to resist today’s progressive totalitarianism should, as Orwell recommended, “look to the proles.” Just as Mill effected a “regime change,” we should look to do the same by aligning ourselves with the instinctive traditionalism of the demos that Mill deplored. In either regime, some theoretical condition of “true liberty” is purely fictional and not an aim requisite for a flourishing society. We will either have today’s “despotism of progress” or the “restoration of good custom.” In the hopes of encouraging the latter, it is time for a revolution against the revolution.
The essay can be read in its entirety here. On May 7, let’s all pray for Mill’s soul, but as well that his philosophy and the mischief it has wrought may also soon rest in peace.
“ It’s Gnosticism all the way down” (NS Lyons, the Upheaval substack).
Pride truly is a sin; They take their access to advanced learning as proof that they are superior. They have the Gnostic’s self delusion of superior knowledge and understanding. It’s a mystical thing they just feel it and it is only right that they should have power and set our course. With that certainty, and considering our recalcitrance, who can blame the liberal for speaking to us in such angry tones of compassion.
When they look at us, NASCAR nation, they seethe with hatred, we are truly deplorable in their eyes. They need to lie to us, clearly we fail to comprehend; It is for our own good.
Well, I suppose the feeling of hatred is mutual. If we were in charge we would be just as bad. If you accept that - power corrupts - then you are lead to a single conclusion. The problem is the overreach of the managed state. A minimalist approach to government and governance properly compensates for human duplicity. Overreach is the problem. And the problem with erstwhile right liberals is greed, they display magical thinking about market forces. Government is needed to ameliorate capitalism with a simple goal: give all members of society sufficient income to live.
Freddie DeBoer, substack
“ in late stage capitalism we have created a culture where it is widely understood that people can’t earn enough money to live “
CS Lewis
“ education without values, as useful as it is, seems to make man more clever devil.”
Both sides of liberalism are equally guilty of devilment.
It’s kind of easy to see that my solution is correct. Ask the Proles, they will agree.
Professor Deneen
Millians also elevate harm to both “stochastic” harm and to self-harm to disarm their opponents, not to arrive at truth. They take the libertarian principle that your rights stop at my nose and say your rights to speech stop if anything happens to my nose, including if I do it to myself.
Mill was smarter than Marx, who thought the masses would rise up against the ruling class. Mill knew the masses were the defenders of custom, the literal repositories of tradition, of submission to unchosen bonds, and therefore that they had to be defeated and mastered by the Enlightened elite in order to assure Progress.
Mill would have been totally in favor of the elites fortifying an election against the possibility of those deplorables prevailing. He did not believe in democracy. He did not believe, like Lenin, in “one man, one vote, one time.” No, Mill believed, like the EU, in “one man, many votes, until he gets it right.”